Teaching Young Adults (Essay)

Teaching Young Adults:
a challenge or an opportunity?
As industrialization thrives every year, higher levels of education are more demanded in
order to supply jobs that requires complex tasks. For this reason, one of the major
concerns about education during the last centuries is to find the way how to teach
effectively to people that is both physically and mentally developed. It’s a well-known
fact that as the anatomy of the brain changes, its activity changes as well. In a child’s
brain, neighboring regions tend to work together. By adulthood, distant regions start
acting in concert (Zimmer, 2016). For some neuroscientists this long-distance activity in
an adult brain might explain why it works more efficiently and process more information.
At this point, differences might seem obvious, and the question arises relentlessly, are
young adults too different in comparison to children? Are there considerations teachers
need to have in mind? If so, what are they?
One of the main differences between young adults and children that the teacher needs
to consider is their behavior. As people go through many different situations, they
acquire so much experience which results in what we call maturity. This affects not only
how they behave among peers but also how they build their own concept about
themselves and their purpose in life. Most of the time, young adults have set their goals
for their lives and generally, they are not forced to learn something because they feel
motivated. Nevertheless, this might turn into a double edge-sword since they demand
relevant and applicable information to their lives; adults need to know why something
need to be learned. (Villanueva, 2020). In addition, people at this stage tend to be more
respectful and reflexive, so the teacher can enjoy some sort of freedom to talk about
complex or delicate topics.
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On the other hand, experiences also broaden their abilities and capabilities. Very often,
when adults attend classes they have been through different levels of education; this
previous knowledge helps them to handle more abstract rules and concepts. It also
allows the teacher to talk using terminologies and concepts that are commonly used by
professionals in the field they are studying. The educational content that teachers use
must reflect the level of educational experience students have or otherwise it would be
just a repetition of what they already know.
In the last paragraphs, we´ve been reviewing some considerations for teaching young
adults as well as their differences in comparison with younger learners, but are they too
different after all? The answer is more complex than we might think because there are
certain things that don’t change to much as we grow up and teachers need to be aware
about it. For example, a common misconception is to reduce the amount of visual
material such as pictures, animations, drawings, etc. and use merely plain text because
we sometimes assume that adults don't have problems to understand great amounts of
text without graphics. Nowadays this has been proven false and science reports that we
respond to visual stimulation much better than optical. In the case of reading, our brain
decodes visual information 60,000 times faster than text. (Newman, 2014). This is
because we are driven animals, driven by images (Grus, 2014).
As a manner of conclusion, we can say that different educational needs require

undoubtedly different methods and techniques that allow exploiting the human potential
in all ways; however, it is important to remember that we can still take advantage of
some strategies used when teaching children. One of them is to include activities that
integrate emotions; storytelling and drawing are perfect for this purpose. On the other
hand, we as teachers can take advantage of the students' backgrounds and create small
groups or communities within the classroom in which everyone interacts and
interchanges their experiences with one another among the group. In addition, we must
remember that the information we share with them has to be relevant or otherwise the
learning process won’t be effective enough. Finally, and not less important, teaching
young adults represents not only a challenge but also an opportunity for teachers to
learn from their students' experience.
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Bibliography
▪ Grus, P. (15 de May de 2014). The Science of Creative Visualization. (J. Steele,
Entrevistador)
▪ Newman, D. (23 de December de 2014). Why Visual Content Will Explode In 2015.
Obtenido de Forbes: https://www.forbes.com/sites/danielnewman/2014/12/23/why-
visual-content-will-explode-in-2015/#345924021cb5
▪ Villanueva, E. (2020). Teaching Practice. Teaching Young Adults. San Miguel, El Salvador.
▪ Zimmer, C. (2016, December 21). You’re an Adult. Your Brain, Not So Much. Retrieved from
New York Times: https://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/21/science/youre-an-adult-your-
brain-not-so-much.html
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Teaching Young Adults:

As a manner of conclusion, we can say that different educational needs require

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